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Hardware

A 140GB CD-ROM? 155

Posted by CmdrTaco from the pr0n-mp3s-and-the-human-genome dept.
Pete Brubaker writes "PCExtremist.com is running a story about some clever individuals that figured out how to layer data on a CDROM to achieve storage capacities 200 times over conventional CDROM's. Thats more than 30 times the capacity of a double sided, double layer DVD. "
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A 140GB CD-ROM? More

A 140GB CD-ROM?

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  • From reading the other article (posted below someplace) it seems that the discs are made up of layers of fluorescent material that emit different wavelengths of light when stimulated by a laser beam.

    It doesn't seem like there would be any problem to just print whatever you felt like on the top side of the disc. I don't know how reflections from the back of the printing surface would affect the process though (although they could use a non-reflective material).

    All in all, I don't think labeling the discs will be a problem.

    In fact, the discs should also be able to be used upside down, provided the motor and circutry are smart enough to realize that they need to work backwards - rotating the disc CW versus CCW or whatever.

  • Re:I hate to think I'm the first... (Score:5)

    by technos ( 73414 ) on Wednesday December 01, 1999 @09:53AM (#1489332) Homepage Journal
    I already went through that with 'CD-Caddies' back in the eighties, and I don't want to go through it again, thank you. Drives that require not only media but mamby-pamby media enclosures SUCK. Media enclosures are an environmental condom for AOL lusers who can't figure out that you PUT THE CD BACK IN THE CASE AFTER USING IT. You all know the AOL mentality! They look at the 'Magic Space Age Disc' and assume 'Well, it LOOKS indestructable' and proceed to use it as a coaster, a chew toy for their mongrel child or as a mirror to pop pimples. Then, when the disc is greasy, scratched, mauled and/or in little bitty bits, they call up the company and bitch that their copy of 'Ascii Spelunker 1.0' stopped working for no good reason and that they should get another copy because 'Ima good Windas user. Ah even knows how to make it do that pretty blue 'an yella screen where it makes sure ahl my disk thingies ahr spinnin' and as such know more than the company whose disc got mangled ever could, and as the superior being DESERVE the FREE disc.

  • I bet that by the time this format becomes mainstream, MS will have a found a way to bloat their code so bad that MS Office and their next release of Windows will fill up an entire disk. Actually, knowing MS, they would probably make their install files total exactly 141 gigs in size... that way they could use 2 disks and charge even more... those fiendish bastards :)
  • DVD's DO NOT use blue wavelengths. They are only a smaller version of the red wavelength ones. I'm guesstimating here, but something like 640 nanometers compared to 720 for regular CD's.
  • >Then if the disk needed a specific codec, it could simply ship with it, or the computer could grab it off the net.

    Would it be legal to set up a web site a la CDDB, but which dished out DVD decryption keys or DIVX viewing keys to all comers? I think not. You would be shut down real quick.

    What you seem to be saying is that, seeing as today we can crack & work around such schemes with some trouble, in the near future it will be even easier. This is an appealing notion, but only holds if the movie & music industries do not continue to try to improve thier daft encryption schemes, which benefit them but not consumers. Unless hit over the head, they will do so, which is why it is important for the makers of new media not to support them in this.

  • Haven't seen them (article in German) [www.geo.de] mentioned here. PAP-DVDs are to be in the market by 2002. PAP stands for PhotoAd ressable Polymers [uni-bayreuth.de].

    The PAP-DVDs will use a thin layer of modified polymers while Holo-CDs [bayer.com] (due out in 2005 with a said storage of 1500 GB) should have a layer of about 1 mm.

    All of this is apparently part of the National Storage Industry Consortium [nsic.org]. Unfortunately the access to the MORE project (Multiple Optical Recording Enhancements) is passworded.

    Anyone got any more info?

    ________________________________
    If encryption is outlawed, only

  • I didn't mention legal issues because I was talking about codecs.

    As in, you don't really need to hammer out all of the possible video formats, as long as there's a way to describe the format to the player (a codec) supplied on the disc or accessible on the net, etc.

    This is like a player which understands MPEG files getting a disc with an AVI (for example) on it. The disc could include the codec, or a URL to download it. The player could either cache this codec in NVRAM, or simply load it everytime it was needed.


    As for the legality... pretty much everything involving copyrights is now illegal, or will be as of the new year, in the USA. The Digital Millenium act really screwed you guys over.

    But, even so, if it was designed properly and players had a large secret key that they could use for authentication, yes, you could run a system where the player not only downloaded the actual decryption system, but also an encrypted (for its secret key only) key which would allow viewing of the disc.

    But, I think that any form of authentication being needed to view a copyrighted work for which you paid to be able to view, is evil. It's like DIVX... you have the right to view the content only as long as the company says you can, in the way they want, and while they are in business.
  • Isn't fluorescence a chemical process, prone to "short" natural life?

    I wonder about expected life time of the fluorescent material, especially under the office/home lighting, and also about natural aging.

    Someone mentioned "organic dye". Could someone knowledgeable add some profile on that?

  • Enough for Office and Win2005. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This is just enough to hold Windows 2005 and Office 2005. That's if M$ does not add too much garbage to it.

    Injured geek wins against Mattel, Mattel still retaliates! [sorehands.com]

  • How about something like the Sony minidisc covers? It's a thin plastic cover. Inside the player, the disc slips out of the cover and is read by the laser.

    The cover makes labeling really handy....

    Jedi Hacker (Apprentice) and Code Poet
  • hmm, call me stupid but they have to have figured out something entirely different from CD or dvd. You figure CD is 650mb for a one-layer disk, and DVD is what, 4.5gb? They say they're using a 10-layer disk and getting 140GB... that's 14GB per layer!! That in itself is a technological jump.
  • I hope someone starts another slashdot and keeps it less political.

    And just how do you propose that they keep it less political? Seems to me that it is the readers that are bringing the heavy political slant, not the editors. If you don't allow the postings, then it isn't a /. is it? Just some thoughts as I get frustrated by people implying that these guys can really control what goes on here beyond shutting it down or making it not Slashdot.
  • First, I see no mention of this using a multi-frequency tunable laser, and as near as I know no such animal exist (if it did the fiber optic companies would be all over it!), but rather that a single laser excites several layers of flourescent material, and it is these different frequencies that come from the materials that are interpretted in order to read the data.

    Second, arstechnica [arstechnica.com] has a follow up article about a british venture capital company that's working on something even better [keele.ac.uk]: think multiple terabytes on a single cd!

    "God does not play dice with the universe." -Albert Einstein

  • But the Write once disk they talk about is only 30mm across. So it's 5 times smaller but with similar capacity... Ideal for notebooks.

  • Moderate: Redundant (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Note this story [slashdot.org] covers essentially identical information.. I guess Rob's too busy buying cool shit with those Andover million$ to pay attention to the stories posted to /....

  • > the pages seem to load slower than ever nowadays!

    Here here!! Ain't that the friggin truth!

  • No Subject (Score:3)

    by um... Lucas ( 13147 ) on Wednesday December 01, 1999 @09:17AM (#1489360) Journal
    This story already ran on the Register [theregister.co.uk] yesterday. And, in case you didn't go read either of the sources, here's a link to the company and product in question.

    LINK [c-3d.net]

    It's the first one down - FMD ROM (Read Only Memory) Disk... Pretty cool how it's clear, huh?
  • I don't care if it's 30mm across or 5 1/4 inches across. If they don't offer a WORM device capable of matching their read-only device they don't offer it and it may be because the WORM process just doesn't work on larger disks, in which case you're stuck with DVD.
  • This is awesome, but have they figured out a way to ruin it by putting some shitty copy protection on it yet?
    It won't be ready for prime time until they have.
    And believe me, I'm sure they're already working on it!


  • You all know the AOL mentality! They look at the 'Magic Space Age Disc' and assume 'Well, it LOOKS indestructable' and proceed to use it as a coaster, a chew toy for their mongrel child or as a mirror to pop pimples

    Well what else are supposed to do with an AOL CD? You aren't suggesting people are actually dumb enough to use AOL, are you?
    --------
    "I already have all the latest software."

  • Sounds great, but does anybody have any idea as to how much they will cost?

    There does not seem to be any info on their website [c-3d.net] and I can't think of a similar product to give me a price guide.

  • woah (Score:1)

    by pyr0 ( 120990 )
    In the words of the immortal Beavis, HeheHEhehEhe, I'll be damned! Seriously though, is there or will there ever be any programs that will need that much space on an install disk?? I can see what great value it might have as an archiving device though.
  • Just a test to prove my understnding of how Slash works.. Methinks I will next grab the old 0.3 Slash code and pry about in admin.pl...
  • Is it just me, or does it look like the guy's holding up the bottom of a cheap CD-Stomper?!? Anyways, if this drive were to be integrated into the PSX2/Dolphin/X-Box, it would make for some pretty bad-ass and long games...
  • Current DVD media is home-writeable (with drives not available in the US, FWIU) at full capacity (18+GB?). Is there some technical reason the 140GB capacity couldn't be reached with a home-based "burner"? Or, are they simply caving *early* to the RIAA, and limiting their technology before it has a chance to make waves?

    Gads... imagine if this technology took hold (and I can't see why on Earth it wouldn't!)... MS could even _further_ bloat their software.

    --Corey
  • If they want to take over from DVD ROM systems it would be better if they could increase the number of layers. Unless they can come up with a reader mechanismthat will support more layers that currently is out there (unlikely).

    We don't need to upgrade and then find out that our 10 Layer system is old hat and they now have a 25 or more layer system.

    (rambling now)

    The credit card idea would be great for things like a Gameboy. GameBoy Riven? 10 Gig. On a Z80 I'm guessing you'd have to bank switch your bank switching registers :-).

    Maybe the next generation Handhelds would be better.

    I guess if the CreditCard reader device could be made small enough you could make a interface cart for handhelds. I'm not much for MP3s but the game potential is huge.


    I wonder how small a reader can be?
  • To the makers of this and other such new devices: Please don't let the Movie and Music Industries convince you to buy into thier dumb-ass encryption, regionalisation, locking or content scrambling schemes. They don't work, and just waste everyone's time. Design the device as a bucket o' data files.



  • Slashdot without the politics is like a burrito without the peppers. borrrrrrriiiiiiiiiiiingggggggggg.....

    Whatsamatta son, can't handle a little jalapeno in your life??

    Slashdot is ya wake up call! Stop hitting the snooze button and get up!
  • The US government is said to have recently ordered a 100,000 disk RAID system, capable of holding a petabyte of data, presumably for activities like archiving Usenet, the web, stock market transactions, etc.

    This is very interesting... do you have a link to an article or something about this?

  • Final Fantasy IX

    mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

  • Reed-Solomon codes or other error correcting codes can be used to prevent a scratch or other minor defect from ruining a disk. This is already done on Audio CDs, CD-ROMs and DVDs. There is a tradeoff between the number/size of errors that can be corrected and the space consumed by error correction checkbits.
  • Somebody mentioned it at a local Cypherpunks meeting, where Duncan Campbell was doing a presentation on the Echelon eavesdropping system. I don't remember who it was, or whether the agency was known (e.g. Livermore Labs, though perhaps acting as a front) or unknown.

  • This is the first time I've heard of this term, but the concept is quite old. At my old university I first suggested that binaries and config files be put on a cdrom, and user space be put on a hard disk.

    Literally speaking, it would be easy to link a ton of files in /etc to /cdrom/etc and link /usr to /cdrom/usr. When upgrades happen, do the upgrades on another machine, copy it all to a new upgraded CDROM, and mount it.

    Of course the problem is there was no cd writer that we knew of, back then, and then the cd is mounted after the init process, so there was a problem. Now that I come to think of it I am going to go home tonight and work on a 'stiff linux' solution myself.....hmmmmmmm......!
  • Check out http://www.howstuffworks.com/cd.htm for a few answers to your question.
  • Answers:

    1. The maximum is 18 Gb, though you'd be pressed to find a DVD-ROM that actually used it.

    2. While they are physically identical in size, there are numerous differences, the largest being their use of the UFS and micro-UFS filesystems on the discs instead of the standard ISO. DVD also uses a slightly different plastic, can support multiple data layers on a single DVD, and has a much higher data density.

    3. The speed is nearly identical. I beleive a 6X DVD-ROM device is comparable to a 48X CDROM in terms of speed, but I may be off a little.

    Corrections? Please do!
  • That tech from Keele University that you mention sounds suspiciously like a variation on a theme to holographic storage, known colloquially as a "holostore". MIT came up with the initial idea back in the 50's but couldn't get it to something commercializable. Periodically, you get someone that comes up with a new twist on the idea that brings it closer to reality each time- but they fail to make it happen for some reason or another.

    Maybe they have it right this time- it'd be cool to have that sort of storage at reasonable price points.
  • It's funny how when you get rich, you suddenly have to live up to much higher standards. If you accidentally post a story that was posted two months ago, you're "busy buying cool shit".

    Bill Gates, of course, is a prime example of this. If there's an article about Bill G or Microsoft here, some people seem to think they can turn their brains off and simply substitute all the S's to $'s to make a good post.

    People, please think before you post. Just because someone has money doesn't automatically make them rotten. Just because a company has resorted to mean and soon-to-be-judged-illegal tactics doesn't mean that every single product they have ever made is buggy, slow and a security hole. Objectivity, please!
  • Both ATAPI and SCSI cdrom drives can be root mounted like regular media, I believe. If for some reason you need a module, you can use the excellent init.rd mechanism Linux provides as a high-level bootstrap for the real root media.

    A simple way to determine which files need RW access would be to snapshot a RW HD partition of 640M, use it in a relitivly static way for a few days, and then compare the file checksums against the snap. (OC, there is probably a file monitor that does it too, I just don't know of one!)

    Then the real question is how to provide for the RW space; Do we use symlinks, or a hybrid overlay mechanism?

  • Now this is something that a patent should be awarded for.

    The technology combined with DeCSS should have RIAA scared straight.

  • Sure. Office 2003, instead of having slides telling how cool the product is during install, could have full-motion video clips of Gates telling you the same thing. "Hi. I'm Bill Gates, and I'd like to tell you about the benefits of registering your copy of Office 2003."
  • The rotating disks don't actually get 1 gigabyte per second read rates, it turns out that only the card media does.

    And as commentary at Tasty Bits From the Technology Front [tbtf.com] points out, the most outstanding claim about FMD drives is the 1 gigabyte per second read rates, a full 200x faster than a 32x CD-ROM, and 40x faster than a 10,000 RPM hard disk. In comparison, capacity only improves 25x over the 5.2 GB DVDs.

    Personally, I find the large capacities C-3D demonstrates just reinforce my perception that buying into DVD technology is just setting yourself up for obsolescence once higher-res HDTV versions of videos and movies become available on post-DVD media like C3D's in a few years (probably more securely next time though! ;-)

    --LP
  • Calling it a 140GB CDROM is a misnomer. It is based on completely different technology. Where CD/DVD uses a laser to reflect off of a surface, this relies on the disk itself glowing with florescence.
  • Anyone care to find an article about HD-ROM? Its a pretty nifty technology that was talked about a few months ago in some technical journals. Basically, it takes the same approach to increased storage as DVD took. Smaller grooves and smaller laser == more data. In their case however, they couldn't get a laser small enough so they had to use an electron beam. The end result is an optical disk supposed to story 250GB. Very impressive.
  • ...i'm wondering if the amount of data that the company who created this new type of CD-ROM format isn't just an arbitrary number. it seems like an outrageous amount of space to be held on the size of what appears to be a regular-sized CD. maybe they used some sort of quantum method. has anyone actually checked the validity of this new type of media?
  • I think the idea is great, but looking at the clear C3D I am forced to ask myself, "Self, how do you label the damn thing?"
  • I don't know about you, but I think that would probibly look too cool for words.

    What is that glowing thing?
    That? It's just my MP3 collection.

  • Couldn't they sidestep the scratching/multiple layer issues by implementing a cartridge enclosure (a la removable Winchester drives?)
  • I've noticed with most 'revolutionary' technologies, they all appear in the news, we read about them and go "That's really cool! I can't wait till that's on the market!" and that's the last we ever hear of that particular technology.

    So I'm wondering when this type of technology will be available on the market, if ever? What sort of costs will be involved, and how long until the price will drop to sensible levels?
  • Nichia Corporation in Japan is about to start mass production of violet laser diodes [mesh.ne.jp], and single-layered disks using these 400 nm lasers have capacities of around 13-16 gb.. The product info page for this FMD-ROM thing specifically points out that the new drives are backward compatible with CD and DVD media (lasers of shorter wavelength can read media designed for longer wavelength) - while it's probably there to avoid scaring people off with proprietary stuff, it introduces further mystery.
    Now, this 140 gb/10 layers = 14 gb per layer disk is announced - is this the first of the upcoming wave of violet laser products? I'm just waiting for a violet laser pointer :)
  • Let every registered user rank every slashdot article and show the rankings in the main screen.

    Pretty cool idea too, but I'm hoping that by opening up the submission queue to many eyes, it should mean that the queues stay short (or can handle more submissions) and each queue moderator spends less time on wading thru them..

    Just think, it's like fixing bugs of a journalistic type rather than a technical type, and as we all know, with thousands of eyeballs all bugs are shallow ;)

    Your Working Boy,
  • Hey, if I remembered it, he should: /. pays his rent, all I do is read the articles and occasionally mouth off.. (Though, in a manner of speaking, I _am_ paid to read /., but don't tell anyone that ;)

    To prevent this, perhaps there should be a separate 'meta-slashdot' site where submissions are ranked by slashdot contributors (say, selected based on karma, instead of arbitrarily by the high priests of /.) without comment, and then released to the public, via a system of submission moderation similar to the system of comment moderation, and where submissions are then presented in user-configurable order..

    If I could get my hands on the current running /. code, I might even write it! C'mon Rob, et. al, it can't be _that_ ugly.. Or at least not as ugly as the code I inherited 4 months ago.... Couldn't be as hard as writing a mass-vhosting system that can manage tens-to-hundreds of thousands of donames and their associated websites (source available upon request [mailto], I just have to prefix all the perl files with the GPL)...

    Your Working Boy,

  • Make it like a minidisc (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    If a full-CD-sized disc can hold 140 GB, why do you have to make them full-sized to be useful? Just make it the same size as a minidisc, same cartridge, etc. You still get big storage without big scratch danger. The article says that their writable discs are going to be smaller than a standard CD anyway (so they're more usable on laptops, etc), so maybe this is already the plan.
  • impress me too much, for a few simple reasons; they don't mention anything around re-writing and this isn't really a breakthrough. This is merely an enhancement of the technology used in DVD players to real multiple disk layers. The transparent medium lets you use a large number of layers because the laser light doesn't get refracted much by it as it would by layers with a particular colour. I would be much more impressed with a re-writable system. The disk technology isn't the one you should look at for a real prize winner, it's the type of laser used. They use a pulse-diode lasers which can be much more easily controlled then dye based lasers and use a good deal less power. Lets hear it for diode lasers!
  • The maximum is 18 Gb, though you'd be pressed to find a DVD-ROM that actually used it.
    Stephen King's The Stand [208.49.168.139] miniserie DVD is the first double-layer double-sided disc.
    But manufacturing resources are still rare for DVD18. Heck, production capacity is already streched for RDSL...
  • Sure it's a great technology. However since DVD's have been proclaimed by so many to be the way to watch movies etc for the next 10 or so years and so many companies have put their futures into developing DVD stuff I almost doubt these new CD's will be backed by nearly as many companies and we may never see these things hit the mainstream.

  • Something else it might give us (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The card is what looks interesting to me. I assume it doesnt spin, and I would assume (or just hope) they dont have a laser that will scan over the card like a photocopier. If theyve found an efficient way to read a high-capcity medium with little or no mechanics, it could do wonders for mobile computing. think weight, size, battery life...
  • BSD style union mounts let you mount the CDROM as / and mount a harddrive "over" it, so that the files on the CDROM show up, but anything you write gets put on the harddrive. This could be workable, although CDROMs are not the fastest things in the world.
  • this relies on the disk itself glowing with florescence.

    I don't know about you, but I think that would probibly look too cool for words.

    What is that glowing thing?

    Do not look into the laser with your remaining good eye.....

  • Re:too easy (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I have a dvd porno cd that is double sided. They label it by writing on the inside part of the disc , near the hole. The problem I see with this is scratching. The double sided dvd-rom I have won't play the other side anymore it somehow got damaged.

    Damaged, or stained?

  • Now I can hack up my DVD collection, and have a place to store them. Only this should fit about 20 different movies.... hah just like my mp3 collection.

    : )

  • Let every registered user rank every slashdot article and show the rankings in the main screen. There really are a lot of articles every day and seeing an article averaging, say, 4/5 would mean it's something interesting to lots of folks and might be worth a look. Users could even set article thresholds just like comment ones.

    Maybe at last we could see an end to all this "this article stinks!" nonsense.

  • I know nothing about this technology, so I have an irresistable urge to lecture about it on /.

    How it works is this:

    The CD consists of multiple layers which are individually pressed in the usual CD way, then stuck together afterwards. The layers have different fluorescence frequencies, and a single frequency laser stimulates all the fluorecent layers at once. If I read their website right, the pressing process makes the usual pits in the plastic of each layer, and a fluorescent material is then put into the pits. At any rate, the data is encoded by having different thicknesses of fluorescent material for ones and zeros.

    Because the fluorescent layers and the intervening glue layers all have identical optical characteristics from the point of view of the laser beam, and because the ones and zeros also look virtually identical to the beam, the medium appears almost completely homogenous, and doesn't scatter or refract the laser, so only the spot you're interested in gets illuminated, and the beam remains parallel right through the medium. This is what allows the highest possible spot densities, and the very large numbers of layers.

    The writable version of this probably /will/ need multiple frequency lasers, to cause photochemical changes in each layer separately.

  • shit.. if they're transparent we can't even do this!!! What a worthless invention!!!
  • Well read down and as you increase the number of applications for the device, the capacity goes down. Read only manufactured in a plant: 140 gigs. Write once: 4 gigs. Current DVD recorders for $500 can store 5 gigs on a DVD, for $5 a gig. CD-R recorders for $100 can store 800 megs per CD at $1.50 a gig. How much would FMD cost per gig? Probably more than either of our two existing formats. Really there isn't even a single working FMD device in existance today. We're talking about a theoretical device which has been simulated on a computer.

  • Of course the artists would play their fingers down to little nubs and scream themselves hoarse trying to fill up these disks.

    I did a little math. In MP3 format, it'd contain over 98 DAYS worth of music. In straight CD-Audio format, it'd be about 9-10 days of music.

    Imagine only needing 4 disks to get you through a year of solid music! {SHUDDER}

    (NOTE: This is using the HD companies' 1000= formula)


    Chas - The one, the only.
    THANK GOD!!!

  • How bout AI or a downloaded personality? Or perhaps a program suite containing the genome and programs to filter/analyze it? I'm sure well figure out plenty of appplications once we get the opportunity.
  • MPEG2 is what stations use to boadcast HDTV. So
    don't sweat it.
  • This story was on slashdot a month ago.
    Prototype 150GByte Read-Only Disk Demonstrated [slashdot.org] by Hemos on 01:56 AM October 5th, 1999 EAS 73
  • This reminds me of something I have only heard little of....Blue Light Laser CDing. From what I've heard....laser light right now is at Red...and obviously Blue is at the other end of the spectrum....and so it is more concentrated and thinner....so you can write more data to the same CD media. Anyone know more about this?

    ~TruPoet
  • That's why DVD's work, and have such high densities.
  • For an install disk. Well, not for a few years. Five maybe.

    Graphics are HUGE. Movies are even bigger.

    When everyone is playing games in 2048x1536x32b, and games have to either have tons of textures, or in the case of top-down games, tons of distinct landscapes, we'll be looking at 140GB and complaining that it's not enough.

    A flight-sim could use this already. As could a decent off-road driving game.

    And as it becomes available, people will use it, precalculating huge data structures to save themselves the trouble of doing it on the fly. (It's not always a bad thing... Quake's BSP trees are precalculated.)

    140 hours of video could allow for a kick-ass interactive movie. Imagine if there was actually room to store alternate paths for a bunch of different decisions.


    I've had the idea of, when space allows, including a map of all roads in North America (all roads mapped in electronic format at any rate) and not only pictures of actual building near the road, but a rough map of the land nearby. Imagine a driving game like Cannonball Run, where you aren't looping around some dull track, but the game starts in one city and ends in another, and all paved roads in both are in the game. Combine that with textures 3d models of the main buildings and landscaping that you can see from the road. Then further imagine you had the ability to go cross country, cutting across fields as a shortcut.

    If storage wasn't a problem, the modelling/texture mapping could be handled with a GPS, a decent laser range finder, a high res digital camera, and some software. Toss it into a van and drive slowly around the area. The GPS knows where you are, space around you would be mapped with the laser, and buildings photographed for the textures. Simply things like light posts could even be identified and replaced with stock models.

    It's beyond or capabilities now, but I bet in five years, EA Sports will be seriously considering it.
  • Hollywood will freak. The RIAA will freak. And they'll never let us buy this stuff unless they get a chunk.

    Grr.

  • Ho humm (Score:1)

    by karrde ( 853 )
    Glad to hear things are going well. But we got this info 2 months ago: Old Story here [slashdot.org]

    Later

  • My question is, how durable are these suckers? What will happen if you scratch it? If a small scratch == unreadable data, there's a serious problem. You're not just losing data stored in one layer, but the nine others behind it!

    Furthermore, are these going to have a "wrong side"? CD ROMs are vulnerable to "media scratches" because they only put a very thin coat over the reflective media on the top side of the cd. I wonder what a media scratch would do to a multi-layered approach like this. How well are the layers bonded to each other? Can chipping occur due to weak bonding?

    Oh well. Just seemed like appropriate questions to ask... If the technology is durable enough that you can use it without walking on eggshells (and isn't horrifically expensive), this could turn out really kewl.


    --Fesh

  • I hate to think I'm the first person to point this out, but if the disc is transparent,
    HOW DO YOU LABEL IT.
    I look around my place and I have various CDR's and CDRW's with backup information, install programs, etc. They all have labels - they all have labels so i can tell what's on the disc, since I can't tell by shining my laser pointer at it, and since I don't want to have to put each one in my new drive to find out. I may be jumping the gun here, but the pictures and the article sure make it look like the thing is totally see through... but i regress.
  • Maybe you have a photographic memory to remember two month old stories, but it's news to me. I'm more than a little sick of this whole "more money" == "sellout"|"poor quality"|"don't have to care anymore" line. If you'd prefer the job of filtering through dozens of submissions a day, feel free to start your own site.
  • amen to that (we love you, Rob!)

    -mark
  • Put it in a case with a sliding door and an opening on both sides. Easy enough.
  • Layering is an old and proven technology. DVD uses two layers. There's no logical reason why two should be the limit.

    The tricky part is cost. A laser that is tunable to many wavelengths is likely to be more expensive than one that only does one or two. Creating the media is also going to be more expensive.
  • I know very little about DVD (as I don't have one on my computer at home, and there is no need for them at work...) I have a few questions:

    #1. How much can a DVD hold? (lots yeah, but how much)

    #2. What is the difference between a dvd and a cd?

    #3. This shows how fast super CD (or whatever its called) can access info, but how fast can a DVD player? (ie are you really gaining a useful meadium or just a big storage device)

    Thoughts?

  • Sure. But that cartridge would double or triple the price of the media.

    Here's hoping that their at least as resistant as standard CD's.


    Chas - The one, the only.
    THANK GOD!!!

  • Why not just forget the electron beam and build your own chip fabrication plant. Make your own silicon wafers and burn them with an ion implantation gun. Then implant not billions but trillions of bytes of data on a single silicon wafer.
  • Actually. No. Trasnmission losses in DVD become nearly unbearable after 2 layers, in DVD. Layering is very difficult, depending on the source of information. I think the real trick is making a good, fast way of mass producing these disks. The CD is great because the data pits can be machine pressed--this is fast and cheap. That isn't true for these, at least according to the web page
  • This is different tech. CD rom uses change in reflectivity because of the pits, or because of a phase change in the material. This uses flourecense, which is quite different. I suppose it is related to a local index of refraction change, but this is a different technology, with different limitations
  • What they are using is called a confocal microscope. The same kind of stuff which is used for single molecule detection of fluorescence labeled proteins and things like that. To get a good z-resolution for the separation of the different layers and to get a good photon detection ratio they have to use a high appertur optic. If the layers are deep enough inside of the disc the beam diameter at the surface can be much larger than the diameter of a scratch and the scratch wouldn't matter at all! As the light is detected at the same side of the disc it isn't a problem to print a label on the other side of the disc. This really should be a practical approach! To make a RW-disc might be difficult because you would need to switch the fluorescence behaviour in a permanent and reversable way. Maybe the new blue diode lasers will make it possible.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • using 120mm discs means that you can reuse lots of cd/dvd production/reproduction/packagin equipment, which given the scale of the cd/dvd industry means big savings in initial media and player cost. cheaper introduction means faster acceptance, etc, etc.
  • First, I see no mention of this using a multi-frequency tunable laser, and as near as I know no such animal exist (if it did the fiber optic companies would be all over it!)


    Actually, most lasers are tunable to some degree; the emission bands that they use aren't perfectly sharp, and adjusting the geometry of the cavity and/or putting in a filter lets you select the final frequency that results. Lasers sold as "tunable" lasers are lasers that have very broad emission bands, with some piece of adjustable frequency-selective hardware (like a diffraction grating) to tune it with.


    Dye lasers are the most significant example of this that comes to mind.


    I've never heard of DVD drives using tunable lasers, so I'm not sure where the messages on the subject are coming from. If I understand correctly, they actually adjust the focal depth of the optical head (or just move the head up and down) to select the layer that they want. (DISCLAIMER: It's been a while since I read up on DVD technology).

  • Probably irrelevant. General purpose computers are getting so cheap that by the time a format capable of replacing DVD (offering actual improvements) came around, the players would probably be integrated with a computer. (Even if the user didn't have a monitor and didn't ever explore that aspect of the device.)

    So, as long as there was a filesystem on there, the format of the files is fairly unimportant as long as it's not proprietary.

    Then if the disk needed a specific codec, it could simply ship with it, or the computer could grab it off the net.

    And a general purpose computer would be able to understand that a raw image at 128khz, 64b is the same basic thing as 44khz, 16b, and use the same codec with different parameters, thus pleasing audiophiles who demand every last irrelevant bit be the same, and pleasing techies to whom a VBR MP3 is more appropriate.



    On a slightly offtopic rant...

    It pisses me off when people demand uncompressed audio of incredibly high data rates. Sure, some piece of music might benefit from having that fidelity at one point, but at all others, it's wasted. The appropriate design would use whatever bandwidth was available and use lossy compression. If that signal needs to be reproduced, then do so, but don't waste the bandwidth by representing all data equally when some is obviously more important.

    For any digital lossless compression, a smart encoder could produce a better representation of the original by encoding a higher quality initial signal in the same space.
  • As other people have mentioned, a plastic sheath around the disc would be ideal. A good example of the sheath would be the type used on 5.2GB Magneto Opticals. Basically a gigantic floppy disk cover.

    Not only would this reduce scratches, but dust and fingerprints would be minimized as well.

    I kinda wish DVD's had such a cover.
  • here's a durability issue that i didn't see addressed on their (tech-poor) web site: they say the disks use flourescent dyes. at a guess these will be nice tunable organic dyes. such materials don't tend to live long, especially when illuminated.

    are these disks going to last more than a few months?

  • Two options.

    • Write the data in the hub of the disk (in that media-free area around the hole in the center).
    • Extend the edge of the CD out a bit and label the circumfrence of the disk.



    Chas - The one, the only.
    THANK GOD!!!
  • The article at PCExtremist.com [pcextremist.com] mentions that the CDs will cost roughly the same amount that current CDs cost to manufacture. Hope this helps.
  • here's a durability issue that i didn't see addressed on their (tech-poor) web site: they say the disks use flourescent dyes. at a guess these will be nice tunable organic dyes. such materials don't tend to live long, especially when illuminated.

    are these disks going to last more than a few months?

    Since these disks have 112Gbits per layer, each bit is only going to be illuminated a 112,000,000,000th of the time.

    PS: Nice pun.

  • I submitted a story about FMD-ROM from OSOpinion two days ago and it wasn't posted:

    http://www.osopinion.com/Opinions/ColinCordner/C olinCordner2.html
  • I'd figure a scratch is a scratch. You scratch it, you lose it. Do you really want to syphon through 140 GB of files in order to determine which files resided on the scratched layer?

    Does it matter what layer the data's on? If it makes things seem different, just think of it as all being on one layer, that if you scratch, you lose. :)

    The solution is really simple. Keep redundant backups. Don't trust the only archive of data to a single piece of media, just as you shouldn't leave all your eggs in a single basket.

  • Why only CDROM density? (Score:3)

    by crow ( 16139 ) on Wednesday December 01, 1999 @09:36AM (#1489464) Homepage Journal
    So why are they doing this with CDROM technology? Why not do the same thing with DVD? Instead of 650M/layer, you would have 4.3G/layer.

    Of course, it isn't as simple as that, because DVD uses a tigher wavelength to squeeze the data closer together. Still, in theory, the idea is sound.

    I guess it's a lot like manufacturing hard drives. You can add space by increasing the density on a platter, and you can add space by increasing the number of platters.
  • I get one of those disks with every 50-CD spindle! And here I've been thinking that it wasn't actually a CD at all, but some kind of protective covering. Silly me!

  • Uses for large ROM devices, social implications (Score:5)

    by billstewart ( 78916 ) on Wednesday December 01, 1999 @09:42AM (#1489479) Journal
    According to the story, the technology can support ~10GB WORM drives, or ~140GB ROM technology.


    Cost of writeable media and drives isn't listed; 10GB conventional magnetic disks currently cost ~$100, so this may not be particularly superior for backups, but it's still in the interesting range. They say the media cost should be similar to current CD/DVD, which may be realistic for mass-produced storage. They also don't say what kind of resources you need to produce the high-density ROM versions - is it only useful for large production runs, or can it make sense for one-offs?


    The US government is said to have recently ordered a 100,000 disk RAID system, capable of holding a petabyte of data, presumably for activities like archiving Usenet, the web, stock market transactions, etc. This technology means that archiving large quantities of data becomes much more convenient for regular people, and for corporations that - remember when a Terabyte of data was huge? (and before that, a GB?) What can you do if you can archive all of your company's transactions, designs, etc., and reproduce them cheaply? How do you design policies on information retention when it's cheap and hard to make sure things got thrown away?


    This could be interesting for security - having large WORM drives that are fast enough to run an operating system off, with write-once capability for log files, lets you run much more secure web servers, because it's hard to trash WORMs. How does this affect operating system design? A friend of mine did some work a few years back called "Stiff Unix", trying to find out what parts of the file system space Unix needs to have writeable, and what parts can be ROM. I think this was on *BSD; it'd be interesting to see how Linux can react to this environment.


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